Snapped Cable

The comings and goings at CNN.

It’s a truism in the news business that reporters and their employers should avoid becoming the story. It used to be a truism, anyway, but in the new world of technology and transparency that’s not possible. Everyone, it seems, is a media hound and a media watchdog and a media attack dog. It’s not just industry insiders who can tell you who’s up and who’s down—anyone you stop in the street will have a reasonably informed opinion about how much longer Katie Couric is going to last at CBS News, how Fox News is doing this week, whether Keith Olbermann is fair, whether Larry King is leaving at the right time or way too late, and can tell you the relative ratings of each of the cable news networks. These are not kind times for any of them: prime-time ratings have gone way down at the big three—Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and CNN. It’s understood that the fortunes of Fox News and MSNBC are tied to their partisan personalities, and to political eruptions—such as last week’s riveting debacle involving a U.S.D.A. employee, Shirley Sherrod, who was yanked around by the sleazy Web publisher Andrew Breitbart, Fox News, the N.A.A.C.P., and her employers—but CNN should be able to do itself proud in good times and bad, and its failures in recent years are troubling. People old enough to remember the intrepidity with which CNN covered the first Gulf War, twenty years ago—it’s what put the network on the map—and its later coverage of Bosnia, wonder whether in-depth TV news reporting is on its way out.

CNN is now perceived to be a loser, not just quantitatively but qualitatively, overshadowed by two loudmouth networks, one partisan by calculation, the other by imitation. CNN has tried to carry on as a genuine news outlet, but something’s not working. Campbell Brown’s 8 P.M. show never caught on, and “Larry King Live” has lost half its viewers in the past year. CNN’s best international reporter, Christiane Amanpour, whose importance to the network’s reputation over the past two decades can’t be overstated, left earlier this year to take over ABC’s Sunday-morning show “This Week.” Finally, in recent weeks, opportunity presented itself, and almost immediately was squandered. Brown decided of her own accord (it seems) to end her show, citing its low ratings, and King announced that he will be leaving in the fall. CNN’s choices to replace them are, at the very least, disappointing: for the 8 P.M. slot, Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, who left office in 2008, when it came to light that he had been patronizing prostitutes (having gone after prostitution rings while he was the state’s attorney general), and Kathleen Parker, a syndicated conservative columnist. King’s 9 P.M. throne is all but certain to be occupied by Piers Morgan, the British celebrity interviewer, talent-competition judge, and former editor of the British tabloids the News of the World and the Daily Mirror, from which he was fired in 2004 for refusing to acknowledge the paper’s mistake in publishing photographs purporting to show British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners—photos that were quickly exposed as fakes.

To media watchers, it may look as though CNN saw its situation not as an opportunity but strictly as a ratings problem. It would fix the ratings by, on the one hand, putting on a polite, perhaps lower-decibel version of the screech shows on Fox News and MSNBC (with a tip of the hat to its own departed “Crossfire”), and, on the other, trying to reel in viewers starved for news of Paris Hilton, Mel Gibson, Kate Gosselin, and the attractive young women who can be counted on to disappear or be murdered on a regular basis. Jonathan Klein, CNN/US’s president, isn’t saying anything about Morgan, whose ascension isn’t yet official, but he maintains that the choice of Spitzer and Parker is in keeping with CNN’s three main strengths: “real reporting, on the scene, roll up your sleeves and find out what’s going on; incisive analysis that is providing viewers with a point of view that they might not have been exposed to; and, finally, informed opinion—informed opinion—by real-life experts.”

Reese Schonfeld has spent his career in the news business, first at U.P.I. and then, fatefully, with Ted Turner, with whom he founded CNN; he’s now writing about television and investing in Internet startups. Schonfeld plainly doesn’t think the Spitzer-Parker show is a good idea. I reached him at home in New York recently (he was watching BBC World News when I called), and he said, “I don’t get it. I can’t think of any reason to put that show on the air.” His assessment of Spitzer, who, he pointed out, has been a lawyer and a politician for his entire career and has no news experience, is that, “at best, he’ll be another shouter.” At the same time, when it comes to news coverage CNN “has a weak starting lineup, and no visible bench. There’s a feeling of insecurity at the network.” He thinks that a merger between CNN and CBS could be a boon. “Not only do I think that Katie Couric could help them a lot, so could Bob Schieffer.”

Klein presents the decision as one of conviction. “We looked at who was out there, whether public intellectuals or former politicians, or people with a news background. We generated a hundred names, probably more. Given the breadth of that roster, we were able to consider a number of different approaches.” Klein was impressed by Spitzer’s rhetorical powers, when Spitzer substituted a half-dozen times last spring on MSNBC’s “The Dylan Ratigan Show.” He is, Klein said, “unusually persuasive and precise; we saw his authority.” And he thinks that the “unpredictability” of Spitzer’s conclusions about issues will attract people. In Spitzer and Parker, CNN had “two independent-minded people who owed nobody anything anymore.” Klein felt so strongly that “we didn’t even try them out on camera.” When I asked him whether he had any reservations about Spitzer’s character, or worried that significant numbers of viewers (such as this one) thought of him as noxious and, on principle, unwatchable, he didn’t answer directly, saying, “As soon as we see the actual show”—it will début in early October—“viewers will find out that it’s the kind of show that cable has been missing.”

But what cable has been missing, many argue, is committed, enterprising reporting, except when there’s a war or a natural disaster. CNN’s unexpected success in covering the Gulf War led to an American love affair with twenty-four-hour-a-day news, but, only a decade later, a CNN foreign correspondent told Ken Auletta, when he was working on a biography of Ted Turner, that news editors at the network “ ‘equate serious with boring.’ ” Executives told him that “there was no big news overseas,” which Auletta interpreted as another way of saying that “in order to get ratings, we need wars or some kind of crisis.” Of course, there are crises all the time, everywhere, but to cover them properly you have to decide that it’s important to cover them, and damn the ratings. All the organizations that have cut back their staffs in recent years are rich enough to cover the world. (Let’s not forget that the three broadcast networks are able to pay their anchorpersons a combined forty million dollars a year.) CNN is owned by Time Warner; though the company’s revenues went down by eight hundred million dollars between 2007 and 2009, it still managed a profit of nearly five billion dollars last year, and CNN, despite dreadful prime-time ratings, had its best year ever.

Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, at Syracuse University, says that he finds CNN’s new lineup “really quite mystifying.” For one thing, “I’ve seen Eliot Spitzer on TV a lot, and if someone were to say, ‘Name ten thousand people that you think might be O.K. on television,’ Eliot Spitzer’s name would not be on that list.” He says he would like to see an 8 P.M. show that followed the lead of Jon Stewart and, to some extent, Keith Olbermann and CNN’s own Anderson Cooper: watching the competition and, on a daily basis, examining, in a reportorial mode, “ ‘O.K., what did Glenn Beck claim about colonial history, and is that really true?’ That’s something that CNN could really sink their teeth into, and it’s in the spirit of the identity they’ve tried to keep in spite of the fact that they think they can’t keep it.”

As for Piers Morgan, it appears that he is what he appears to be: “a kind of overgrown naughty schoolboy,” as Roy Greenslade, a veteran British journalist and media watcher (he is a columnist at the Guardian and a professor of journalism), put it. Morgan’s cheekiness coexists with some less adorable qualities. He has committed a number of infamous ethical breaches, including buying stock based on information from his own business writers at the Mirror (the writers were fired, and one of them did jail time), and publishing pictures of the then wife of Princess Diana’s brother taken while she was a patient at an addiction-treatment center. “He just doesn’t believe there are rules for him,” Greenslade said. He’s a good interviewer, though, “and hugely confident, and he has charm, and the combination of those factors makes him a natural successor to Larry King, really.” Like many other people, Greenslade is puzzled by CNN’s “taking the route of entertainment over news.” Not that Morgan won’t be able to tackle serious subjects—“but he will not broach them in a serious way. He’s hugely quick-witted and a fast learner, and he can pretend. He’ll fake it—but will it work?” ♦